Sometimes I Can Still Hear Her Voice
by caballlah
Summary: Saying 'stop telling people I'm dead'. They're either haunted or in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. But no way does Chuck owe her re-life to a piemaker.


Olive had a pie in the oven when they got back late that night, and she brought it out bubbling and smoking with deliciousness, cutting it so that it let out gouts of steam in symmetrical slices, plating the individual slices, and dropping tall glasses of milk at each station.

"So how'd it go?" she asked.

Ned stared at her stonily. Chuck stared at her stonily. Lily stared at her half-stonily. Even Vivian looked a bit abashed, like while she was still happy and believing she lived in the best of all possible worlds and that humanity was basically good—she was a little embarrassed by it.

"Tell her," Ned said, bracing himself.

"Chuck's a zombie," Lily said.

"Chuck's a ghost," Vivian said.

"Well… you're a bit in the ballpark, I suppose?" Olive said.

Chuck began joylessly digging into her slice of pie. It was evident that much wearying effort had gone into trying, and failing, to convince her aunts slash mother that she was neither spook nor ghoul.

"The zombie apocalypse is _coming,"_ Lily stated, with a sharp smack of one chopping hand against one flat palm. "We have to get ready. Fortify the house. Make supply runs. Ned, Olive, you can bunk with us. Once it starts, this city'll go up like a powder-keg, but we'll need cooks in the new world order, not to mention virile young—"

Emerson was sitting in a nearby booth, having come down from his office for tea. This seemed like a good time to spill it as well. "What is it with you white people and zombie apocalypses? It's like you all can't wait to grab a bunch of guns and have an excuse to see everyone who ain't your Facebook friend as some gun-toting loon."

He himself tended to suspect most strangers of being possible gun-toting loons, but he came by it honestly. He didn't live in the suburbs.

"You're invited too, Emerson," Vivian said. "Isn't he, Lily?"

Lily grumbled an assent.

"That is, if it is zombies, which I don't think it is—restless spirit, chew with your mouth closed."

Chuck moaned to herself as she took smaller bites.

"Well, what about Chuck?" Olive insisted. "She's your daughter slash niece. Are you just gonna write her off as one of the shambling horde?"

"Course not!" Lily said gruffly. "She's one of the good ones."

"Oh, I bet you've been waiting to say that," Emerson muttered.

"Can we please stop with all this discord?" Vivian begged. "I fear we'll anger the unresting specter…"

"I am not an unresting specter!"

"It's true you haven't been getting much sleep lately," Ned said, trying to play peacemaker.

"If we could just hold a séance—" Vivian said.

"I'm right here! You can just ask me things!"

"Do you need to eat brains or will any human flesh do?" Lily asked. "Because I can get human flesh, easy."

"Aunt Lily… I mean, Mom…" Chuck kneaded her throbbing sinus. "Can I still call you Aunt Lily or would that be too _Flowers In The Attic?"_

"Well," Vivian said, in an anticipatory pitch that had everyone sharing a bracing thought of _oh boy._ "Your father was my fiancé, making you my prospective stepdaughter—or the restless spirit of my prospective stepdaughter who has not found peace—"

"I have too found peace!" Chuck shouted.

"In which case Lily would be your step-aunt," Vivian finished lamely. "Would you like us to burn your bones, dear? That might help some. Or _oh—_ did someone steal your cadaver!?"

"I'm not a ghost!" Chuck said, and gave Vivian a vitriolic pinch. "Sorry."

"Rage virus taking over?" Lily demanded. "Do you need fresh brains? Some of these people I don't know very well, and I'll go ride or die for my little girl."

"Wait," Ned asked, "who here would you be willing to kill and feed to Chuck?"

"Oh, like it'd be some big surprise," Emerson commented, already planning to take advantage of Lily's blind spot if it came down to a fistfight.

"Nah, I like you," Lily said. "You've got gumption."

"Not a zombie either!" Chuck protested. "Not a ghost!"

"Vampire?" Olive suggested.

"Olive!" Chuck moaned, giving her an almost paternally disapproving look of 'don't you start'.

"You don't like garlic," Olive said defensively.

"But look at my tan!"

"That could be the tan of the blood of the living."

"Fresh human blood gives me a tan?"

"It gives Hayley Atwell smoother skin," Olive retorted. "I read about it on TMZ."

"I am not a vampire!" Chuck said with a definitive sweeping of her arms. "And before anyone asks, I'm not a Frankenstein either!"

"Frankenstein's monster," Ned corrected, and Chuck gave him a look suggesting that she would box his ear if doing so wouldn't unanimate her reanimated corpse.

"So obviously she a clone," Emerson ventured, and Ned gave him a softly disappointed look. "I'm an overweight guy living in a pie shop. I've got to take my fun where I can or I'll be shopping Wal-Mart in those little scooters they have."

"That explains it," Lily nodded. "Government, right? Multinational corporations. They give you a bar code?"

"I don't have a bar code! Right Ned?"

"Right."

"How would you know, pie boy?" Lily demanded.

"I've… checked? But I didn't touch her! Trust me, you'd know if I had touched her!"

"He didn't touch me," Chuck confirmed. "And I didn't touch… him," she put in, her eyes darting from side to side.

"I do that over the internet," Olive said.

"She doesn't have to be a clone." Vivian looked offended on Chuck's behalf. "Maybe she's a twin sister…"

"Chuck didn't have a twin sister," Lily said firmly.

"Oh… that's right… you'd know…"

The pie shop descended, swiftly and abruptly, into the same haze of hurt, confused wariness that it had started out in.

"Robot?" Emerson suggested.

"It's not funny anymore," Ned said. He got a look from Chuck. "Not that it was ever funny. Even when someone said you were a vampire."

"That was me!" Olive beamed.

"It's Ned," Chuck said, trying to sound calm and confident and knowledgeable—British, even. "He has some mutant ability or radiation superpower or maybe he's the Chosen One, but when he touches dead things, they come back to life. He touched me, I came back to life, and now I'm vaguely immortal. I know it's weird, but is it really any stranger than a ghost zombie apocalypse?"

The aunts (and also mother) mulled it over.

"What if there was an Egyptian curse?" Lily asked.

"She could be a mummy without all the bandages!" Vivian cried.

Chuck faceplanted right into her pie.


End file.
